Gde bi sve trebalo lansirati SF ekspedicije...

New findings from NASA’s Curiosity Rover provide evidence that significant amounts of oxygen once permeated the atmosphere of ancient Mars. The Red Planet, it would seem, was more Earth-like than we thought.

Using the ChemCam instrument atop Curiosity, scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory have discovered high levels of manganese oxides in Martian rocks. The rover made the discovery in mineral-filled cracks in sandstones in the Kimberley region of Gale crater. The presence of this chemical element suggests that high levels of free-floating oxygen once existed on Mars, and that in addition to having a warmer climate and lakes of liquid water, this planet was once quite Earth-like in terms of its chemical composition.

“The only ways on Earth that we know how to make these manganese materials involve atmospheric oxygen or microbes,” noted study lead author Nina Lanza in a statement. “Now we’re seeing manganese-oxides on Mars and wondering how the heck these could have formed.”

It’s highly unlikely that microbes produced Mars’ manganese, but the suggestion that they were produced by free-floating oxygen is wholly reasonable. The researchers say that high-manganese materials like the ones discovered on Mars aren’t capable of forming without copious amounts of liquid water and oxygen.

But where did all this oxygen come from, and where did it all go? Lanza’s team hypothesizes that oxygen seeped out of the planet’s water and into the Martian atmosphere as Mars’ magnetic field collapsed. Without a magnetic field to protect the surface from ionizing radiation, the molecules within the water split into hydrogen and oxygen. Due to the relatively low gravity on Mars, the planet couldn’t hold on to the lighter hydrogen atoms, but the heavier oxygen atoms stayed put.

Over time, this oxygen bled into the rocks, creating the rusty red dust that now covers its surface. Tellingly, it doesn’t take much oxygen to create the red iron oxides—but it does take a lot of oxygen to form manganese oxides. This means that Mars, for a time, was quite oxygen-rich.

And that’s an exciting result. Mars may have been habitable a billion years ago or so, so it may have spawned basic microbial life (we have yet to find any proof of this, but we’re still looking). Oxygen, which is necessary to sustain most terrestrial life, is used in cellular respiration and other biological processes. Many important classes of organic molecules in living organisms contain oxygen, including proteins, nucleic acids, carbohydrates, and fats. It’s possible that exotic alien life might emerge without the benefit of oxygen, but here on Earth it’s been critical.

Revealingly, Curiosity is not the only probe to have found manganese on Mars. The Opportunity rover recently discovered high-manganese deposits at a site thousands of miles away from Curiosity, so this latest discovery is not specific to Gale Crater. Moving forward, the researchers would like to compare manganese produced by microbes to see how it differs from those produced by oxygen. Until more is known, nothing can be ruled out.

Next week, Juno—the solar-powered spacecraft that’s been closing in on Jupiter since 2011—will arrive to orbit the planet and send us back photos and data. But already, researchers have taken an infrared view of the planet that reveals an incredibly active atmosphere.

Because Juno will (among its other jobs) monitor changes in Jupiter’s atmosphere, researchers wanted to get a baseline look at the movement of the planet’s atmosphere. Once Juno arrives, they intend to use these pictures, along with the new data sent back from the spacecraft, to create a 3-D map of the planet’s atmosphere.

To get the infrared image, researchers from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) combined newer digital tech with an analog technique called “lucky imaging.” In this method, researchers take photographs in a series of bursts to create thousands of short exposure images from the same angle.

Most of the photographs taken from Earth-bound telescopes do not show a clear image. But within every thousand or so of the unusable frames, there are a few “lucky” frames that come out clear. Once researchers have enough of those clear images, they are able to stitch them together to get a complete picture of the planet’s atmosphere.

Researchers at ESO used that technique to get this infrared shot, which shows cool gas clouds moving rapidly upwards through Jupiter’s atmosphere. Although researchers were able to identify the source of the turbulence they were seeing in the atmosphere, they still have questions about how the movement happens and what it means for the planet itself. When they combine these images with Juno’s data to create a 3-D atmospheric map, researchers hope to get answers.

“These maps will help set the scene for what Juno will witness in the coming months,” Leigh Fletcher of the UK’s University of Leicester and lead researcher on the project, explained in a statement. “Observations at different wavelengths across the infrared spectrum allow us to piece together a three-dimensional picture of how energy and material are transported upwards through the atmosphere.”

With Juno’s arrival next week—and its much better vantage point—we’ll be able to get a more complete picture of exactly what is happening around the mysterious planet.

OK, last, totally unrelated question. I was looking at your Twitter account and I saw a couple of Battlestar Galactica references. Are you a fan?

I’m a huge fan! I’m not sure I’m allowed to say that. I kind of watch anything on the Syfy channel. I think it’s reasonable, you can own your nerd credibility when you’re an astronaut. I gotta say Starbuck is my favorite character.

Logged

"I am the end of Chaos, and of Order, depending upon how you view me. I mark a division. Beyond me other rules apply."

The engineers and scientists working on NASA’s Juno mission have been busying themselves, getting their newly arrived Jupiter orbiter ready for operations around the largest planetary inhabitant in the solar system. Juno successfully entered Jupiter's orbit during a 35-minute engine burn on Monday, July 4. Confirmation that the burn had completed was received on Earth at 8:53 pm. PDT (11:53 p.m. EDT) that evening.

As planned, the spacecraft returned to high-rate communications on July 5 and powered up five of its science instruments on July 6. Per the mission plan, the remaining science instruments will be powered up before the end of the month. Juno’s science instruments had been turned off in the days leading up to Jupiter orbit insertion.

The Juno team has scheduled a short trajectory correction maneuver on July 13 to refine the orbit around Jupiter.

"Prior to launch five years ago we planned a date and time for the Jupiter orbit insertion burn and the team nailed it,” said Rick Nybakken, project manager for Juno from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "We are in our planned 53.4 day orbit. Now we are focusing on preparing for our fourth and final main engine burn, which will put us in our 14-day science orbit on October 19.”

The next time Juno’s orbit carries it close by the planet will be on Aug. 27. The flyby is expected to provide some preliminary science data.

“We had to turn all our beautiful instruments off to help ensure a successful Jupiter orbit insertion on July 4,” said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “But next time around we will have our eyes and ears open. You can expect us to release some information about our findings around September 1.”

JPL manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott Bolton, of Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. Juno is part of NASA's New Frontiers Program, which is managed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, built the spacecraft. Caltech in Pasadena manages JPL for NASA.

Tappeiner and his cohorts at Anki built an incredibly entertaining little robot that reads your facial expressions, has enviable spatial awareness, and can experience its own series of emotions thanks to an intricately programmed AI featuring over one million lines of code. The software development kit that will launch with Cozmo gives you access to all that code in a language (Python) that’s a breeze for programmers, and only mildly terrifying for the rest of us.

Tappeiner’s wife, a programmer with no background in robotics, had access to the SDK for an hour and immediately linked it up the her Hue lights. As soon as Cozmo saw more than two people sit down on the couch it dimmed the lights for prime movie watching.